Evaluating Perceptual Cue Reliabilities

Evaluating Perceptual Cue Reliabilities

October 11, 2006 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Abstract:The world provides many sensory cues to properties of an observed scene. In order to integrate information provided by multiple cues in an efficient manner, observers must assess the degree to which each cue provides reliable versus unreliable information. Two hypotheses are reviewed regarding how observers estimate cue reliabilities, namely that the estimated reliability of a cue is related to the ambiguity of the cue, and that people use correlations among cues in order to estimate cue reliabilities. Two sets of experiments are reported which studied these ideas in the context of integrating visual and auditory signals for the purpose of locating an event in space, and in the context of integrating multiple visual cues based on correlations between visual and haptic (touch) signals. It is shown that cue reliabilities are important both for cue combination and for aspects of perceptual learning.